


"People of Wealth and Position": the Targets of CAM’s Blackmail

by VioletHuntress



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-24
Updated: 2014-01-24
Packaged: 2018-01-09 21:22:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1150933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VioletHuntress/pseuds/VioletHuntress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Critique of BBC Sherlock and Moffat in particular, looking at the targets of C.A.M's blackmail in comparative perspective.</p>
            </blockquote>





	"People of Wealth and Position": the Targets of CAM’s Blackmail

The quote that’s been circulating on Tumblr about “Moffat’s singular achievement” in managing to be more sexist than the 19th century literature he’s borrowing from led me to think more about certain other changes that were made to the C.A.M. storyline. One that suddenly jumped out to me was this one: the reason why Lady Smallwood contacted Sherlock regarding CAM in the first place:

> MAGNUSSEN: In 1982 your husband corresponded with Helen Catherine Driscoll.
> 
> LADY SMALLWOOD: That was before I knew him.
> 
> MAGNUSSEN: The letters were lively, loving – some would say explicit – and currently in my possession.
> 
> LADY SMALLWOOD: Will you please move your hand?
> 
> MAGNUSSEN (narrating part of one of the letters): “I long, my darling, to know the touch of your … (he pauses briefly, then continues) … body.”
> 
> LADY SMALLWOOD: I know what was in the letters.
> 
> MAGNUSSEN: She was fifteen.
> 
> LADY SMALLWOOD: She looked older.
> 
> MAGNUSSEN: Oh, she looked delicious. We have photographs, too – the ones she sent him. (He smacks his lips.) Yum yum.
> 
> LADY SMALLWOOD: He was unaware of her age. He met her only once before the letters began. When he discovered the truth, he stopped immediately. Those are the facts.
> 
> MAGNUSSEN: Facts are for history books. I work in news. ([x](http://arianedevere.livejournal.com/67234.html))

Now, like many other things in HLV, this backstory is left irritatingly ambiguous. He “met her only once”—did that meeting involve sex? Maybe not: he writes in the letters, “I long to know … the touch of your body”—that might imply he doesn’t know it yet. But, you know, there might also be an implicit “again.” Nevertheless, even if there was no rape, she sent him photographs, which would certainly be considered child pornography. The entire situation—it was 1982, so if Lord Smallwood is about 65 now, that makes him around 33 or so back then, and all of this was going on with a 15 year old girl. And, well, that whole situation is pretty repulsive. I don’t care if he thought she was 18—she was 15 and it was his responsibility to find out. He didn’t. His whole life shouldn’t be ruined because of this, but once again let me repeat my mantra: he should take responsibility, not evade it. Somewhere out there there is a 46 year old woman that knows that she was taken advantage of by someone in her past. Maybe she’s fine with it; maybe she’s traumatized by it—we don’t know. But we probably should care. The narrative doesn’t ask us to.

Why did Moffat come up with this story? It’s not ACD canon. In fact, in the canon story, both victims that we hear about are women, and both are being directly victimized by Milverton—not their husbands. Lady Eva Blackwood, who comes to Holmes with her case, has this problem:

> This fiend [Milverton] has several imprudent letters — imprudent, Watson, nothing worse — which were written to an impecunious young squire in the country.

I think there’s every reason to believe these letters were perfectly innocent, by our standards. They were letters written between two mutually consenting individuals who loved each other and probably had sex outside of marriage. Why would they ruin Lady Eva, then? Let’s think about women in the Victorian Era:

> For the Victorians, virtue and virginity were synonymous. A woman who lost her virginity outside of marriage—regardless of the circumstances surrounding that loss—was ruined. For all intents and purposes, then, a woman’s virtue resided in her hymen. Will—a woman’s will at least—played little or no part in the business. The Victorians, certainly not the first or the last to do so, had confused virginity, a physical state, with virtue, a metaphysical condition. ([x](http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/05/you-aint-ruined-how-thomas-hardy-took-on-victorian-era-purity-culture/276289/))

I believe this would be especially true for women in the upper classes, who had an “image” to manage. Later, we also find out a bit about the blackmail victim who actually shoots CAM. Another woman. She says this:

> "So you sent the letters to my husband, and he — the noblest gentleman that ever lived, a man whose boots I was never worthy to lace — he broke his gallant heart and died. You remember that last night, when I came through that door, I begged and prayed you for mercy, and you laughed in my face as you are trying to laugh now, only your coward heart cannot keep your lips from twitching. Yes, you never thought to see me here again, but it was that night which taught me how I could meet you face to face, and alone. Well, Charles Milverton, what have you to say?”

Is this Lady Eva? Is it someone else? We don’t know, because her identity isn’t revealed. But once again we have letter, we have a woman who (internalizes misogyny) and confesses she wasn’t “worthy” of her noble husband. We don’t know the contents of these letters: maybe it was pre-marital sex; maybe it was an affair during her marriage. Who knows. (I would guess the former, because of the parallel to Lady Eva’s situation.) But there’s no sense that the sexual relationship these letter imply was anything but consensual, even if it would have been understood as “scandalous.”

I get it—how do you update these situations to the 21st century, when we no longer consider premarital sex the “ruination” of a woman?

Easy. Lady Smallwood is in politics—it’s so easy to make anything that politicians do to be seen as scandalous! Why not have CAM threaten to expose her affair with a member of the opposition party? An affair with a visiting foreign diplomat? An affair with a CEO whose company got a big government contract? _Literally everything in politics can be scandalous._ I don’t know why Moffat chose this particular storyline.

One thing it made me think of, though, is something going on in Britain right now, where a whole host of older male celebrities are being charged with statutory rape. There was Jimmy Savile, of course (though it was posthumous), and the BBC’s whole cover-up of that; and now, recently, in a very familiar sounding storyline, Bill Roache:

> Coronation Street actor Bill Roache has been charged with two counts of rape involving a 15-year-old girl in the 1960s, the Crown Prosecution Service has said. ([x](http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/may/01/bill-roache-charged-rape-1967))
> 
> (Also see [this article](http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/16/bill-roache-raped-15-year-old-trial-coronation-street) for a more recent update on the story.)

However vile these men’s actions are, there is still so much apologism for it. Watching the [BBC documentary](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nspvr) about the massive, decades-long cover-up for Jimmy’s Savile’s repeated rapes (statutory and otherwise), there was still so much apologism for this man and others like him: it was a “different time”; it wasn’t considered so bad then, we just knew that he “liked young girls” and liked to party with them; etc. I can’t help but be reminded of this when Moffat writes an episode that explicitly invokes recent events (an inquiry into Rupert Murdoch and his newspaper’s intrusive and illegal news-gathering procedures), and then also invokes an older, famous man of privilege being “targeted” for his sexual exploits with a 15 year old girl several decades ago. Only Moffat here positions him as a victim, not the girl. In a case where canon offers several possibilities for the creation of a blackmail scenario, Moffat chooses to go off book and go in…this direction. And it makes me profoundly uncomfortable.


End file.
